[Kzyxtalk] Regarding the latest debacle at KZYX.

[sako4 at comcast.net]

Nicely done, Marco. Well written piece. 

And what is the KZYX Board's response? To hold its next Board meeting at a venue so remote -- the Point Arena Library -- that hardly anyone can be expected to attend the meeting. With Lorraine and Raoul both resigning in disgust, you would think the Board would hold its next meeting in a more central place, like the Anderson Valley or Ukiah, so as to maximize attendance by the public. The public needs answers. But no. Nobody will make the trip to the obscure venue in Point Arena, which, of course, is exactly what the Board wants as it installs Stuart "Stewie" Campbell as the station's next Genera; Manager -- the prize he has long sought. 

Campbell is dangerous. I repeat, Campbell is dangerous. Very dangerous. As I have repeatedly point out, Campbell is a protege of that great con man from the 1970s, the used car salesman known as Jack Rosenberg, a.k.a.. Werner Erhard. 

Rosenberg epitomized the worst of the Me Decade. And now we'll soon be having his flunkie, Campbell, running KZYX. 

My thoughts turn toward John Coate. He is suffering horribly now with prostate cancer, possibly dying. Life is short. I'm sorry for Coate. 

I'm sorry, too, for KZYX. I suspect KZYX is failing. Has the station's obituary already been written? I suspect, yes. Scott Peterson has found irregularities in the station's IRS Form 990 returns that are so serious they border on fraud. Once the FCC or CPB finds this out, we can say good bye to that great and noble experiment known as KZYX. We lasted 25 years. It was a good run, I guess. But a lot of good people, yourself included, got hurt along the way. 

I'm sorry for Coate, I'm sorry for KZYX. I'm sorry for you, and Doug McKenty, and Norman De Vall, and Beth Bosk, and Johanna Schultz, and Sister Yasmin, the many other excellent programmers who were passed over by an over-politicized organization intent on protecting their petty little fiefdom. And I'm sorry for the listeners who never heard your shows. 

I'm sorry. 

-- John 





----- Original Message -----

From: "Marco McClean" <memo at mcn.org> 
To: "kzyxtalk" <kzyxtalk at lists.mcn.org> 
Cc: discussion at lists.mcn.org 
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 8:43:45 PM 
Subject: [Kzyxtalk] Regarding the latest debacle at KZYX. 

Regarding the latest debacle at KZYX. --by Marco McClean 


It's a great word: debacle. I like all three ways people pronounce it. 


Quite by chance I came across a visual metaphor for the modus operandi of KZYX since its inception. This, like that, is a syncopated comic masterpiece of failure and then jump-cut return to ready-to-fail-again state. It comes with commentary by James Vincent, and here's a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/AMetaphorForKZYX 


Study that, then read this: Recently Lorraine Dechter, having been sabotaged materially and organizationally from the get-go, wrote that her abrupt resignation as manager after six months (recall Raoul van Hall's having lasted only six weeks, so props to Lorraine) was a "mutual decision". Mutual between what parties? Because if the decision was mutual between her and the board, then the board met unethically. Again. And it's not merely unethical; conducting station business as a board without public notice or participation is against the law and threatens MCPB's corporate personhood. 


And there's nothing on the KZYX website about this situation, and of course no discussion on the air. I'm sure you remember my having pointed out numerous times how peeved-Nixon/Secret-Squirrel the inner politburo of MCPB is and has always been. 


All problems of KZYX could be solved by putting a prominent link on KZYX.org to an unmoderated forum open to airpeople and members and the public, who pay for KZYX in taxes whether we like it or not. $4,000,000+ just in tax derived money has disappeared into MCPB, plus another ten or eleven million dollars in membership and anonymous big-ticket donor money: a recipe for corruption. And that's while the MCPB board and their close sycophants laugh at the idea of paying a pittance to the airpeople, without whom they'd be just another automated NPR station, and they'd /still/ be paying the handful of shlubs in the office a quarter of a million dollars a year to sit there and watch the computer blink, and answer the phone to say that whoever you're calling for is not available, and let the needlessly overcomplicated infrastructure go to hell, so the airpeople have to declare on a regular basis, on the air, that something's wrong, and ask any listeners who might know who to call to fix it (!) to please do so. 


KZYX breaks down more often than KNYO does, and KNYO has several remote studios, and everything else KZYX must maintain, and also has a performance space, but does it all on a budget of less than $12,000 a year. 


Last year I applied to manage KZYX, from a position of a deep understanding of publishing and broadcasting in general and local radio in particular, both commercial and nonprofit. The Stuart Campbell-appointed manager-search committee chairman threw my application away without even considering it, and when a John Sakowicz, then on the board, read in the newspaper that I'd applied, and he wondered why he had to read it in the newspaper to find out, that same chairman lied to him that I had never applied. The board hired Lorraine. So why would they undermine her, and sabotage her, and /resign/ her? Because it's their nature. Again, see James Vincent's commentary on a comic GIF: http://tinyurl.com/AMetaphorForKZYX 


Just to get us all on the same page: in the real world running a radio station is dead easy. A transmitter is as reliable as a refrigerator and uses a comparable amount of electricity. A little home or office refrigerator (or a low power radio transmitter) uses a few hundred watts, and a big high power one uses a few thousand watts. Electricity costs about 15 cents per thousand watts, per hour. There is no way, short of abject crookery or mental retardation or a rat's nest of bureaucratic financial OCD for a radio station with a 4,000 watt transmitter and a fifty watt STL and two thirty watt translators to cost $600,000 a year to run. That is many times too much; it's /fifty times/ what KNYO costs. If the vermin at the heart of KZYX can be sieved out and exposed to the light, the airpeople can all be paid and the tech problems can be solved, and my show can be on KZYX at last, and there'll still be a fortune left over. 


I'm copying this to the board(*), to make sure that comes up as an agenda item for the boardmembers to discuss out loud with each other and the attendees at the coming meeting. Bring the financial books. 


(*) Rather, I'm copying it to the /comment box/ buried in the website, as the individual board members still refuse to make their contact information available. This is another ongoing problem that should be addressed at the meeting, as there's no way to know that Stuart Campbell doesn't still have access to that box, to intercept and interfere with material meant for the other boardmembers, which he did routinely when he hijacked the office years ago, and why would he give up the keys, given his history? In fact, it would possible for a single person with such web and email keys to be the source of a great deal of at least the latest few years of never-ending dysfunction at KZYX. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that person turned out to be Stuart Campbell, though from what I've seen at board meetings Meg Courtney matches him for sour spite. Tch, the whole bunch of them have the sense of humor of a box of hammers. I'm not ready to lay down any bets, I guess. 


-- 
Marco McClean memo at mcn.org http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com 

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